May 26, 2004

Canyonero!

I've been working from home most of the week. Sainted Wife's minivan is the body shop recovering from its run-in with the father-in-law, and the various comings and goings required are made much easier if I stay home with the kids while she schleps back and from the house to the body shop to the rental car place. Plus, we'd been informed that no, we couldn't have the rental equivalent of the minivan, would we like a Taurus?

The Taurus might be a fine vehicle when it comes down to it, but it's obviously not nearly as easy to install one's kids, their car seats, and all their associated gear into one as it is with a minivan--so I stayed home to help reduce the pain the ass factor in the wife's life. Given my penchant for cursing at the monitor when things go wrong, I suspect my office mates are enjoying their vacation from my company. Plus, Ngnat is learning lots of new words--some of which may have come from her mother when the insurance company told us they weren't required to give us a minivan just because that's what was in the shop. We were getting a Taurus whether we liked it or not.

Except, we didn't, as the rental place was fresh out of Tauruses...Taurusi...Fords. Oh, frabjous day! Sainted Wife returned in, of all things, a 2004 Suburban--which she loved, and the woman is not a fan of American cars, believe me. It could have eaten the minivan whole and had room to spare for a Volkswagen or two. It could run down the entire Earth Liberation Front without waking the baby in the back seat. It's a squirrel squishin' deer smackin' drivin' machine.

Big. Damn big. So big that if one isn't looking, the right side passenger door will close right over the automatic lock/unlock handle for the garage door opener chain drive, causing the truck to pull the garage door down on top of itself when it backs up, not to mention ripping the garage door motor mount brackets right out of the ceiling when your husband tries to take your four-year-old daughter to the pool, expanding her vocabulary considerably.

Fortunately, our garage door opener installer had the presence of mind to affix a bright sticker with his number on it to the back of the door on the day he installed the opener. "24 hour Emergency response!!!" it read, making me wonder exactly how many garage door emergencies there are at, say, three in the morning.

I got his voice mail. 20 minutes later our entire neighborhood lost power--we still don't know why. We tied the garage door down with weed eater mono, then sat in the hot dark for five hours before going to bed. It was a hell of a night.

He called back this morning--the power had come back on in the night, obviously. One ten-minute appointment and $75 later we had a functioning garage door--one with a brand new sticker, as the old one was showing worrying signs of age.

"Those are my retirement," he said.

Aside from a crease or two, the garage door is fine, as is the Suburban. Not a scratch on it.

We've retied the automatic lock/unlock handle so that it doesn't hang down quite as far.

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